Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 2002. Vol. 3. Eger Journal of English Studies.(Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 29)

Albert Péter Vernes: Translation as Interpretation

TRANSLATION AS INTERPRETATION 131 appears in Seleskovieh (1977), where she notes that problems in the process of interpretation arise when the translator lacks the necessary knowledge of the world and/or of the cognitive context (of the text) which can enable her to work out the non-verbal sense of the text on the basis of its linguistic meaning. Gutt (1991) lists four kinds of misinterpretations which may arise when a linguistic utterance is interpreted against a context different from the one that was actually intended by the communicator: • The use of wrong contextual assumptions can lead to the choice of the wrong semantic representation; • A wrong context may lead to the derivation of a wrong propositional form; • Wrong contextual assumptions can prevent the identification of a propositional form as an intended explicature or as only a source of implicatures; • A wrong context can also lead to the derivation of implicatures not intended or, vice versa, to the loss of implicatures actually intended by the communicator (p. 73). The terms explicature and implicature are meant in the following sense. When an assumption communicated by the utterance is a development of a logical form encoded by the utterance, we call this assumption an explicature. This is the case with ordinary assertions, where the propositional form of the utterance is part of the intended interpretation. The situation is different, of course, with figurative or non-assertive utterances: here the propositional form of the utterance is not an explicature because it is not part of the intended interpretation. When an assumption is communicated otherwise, it is called an implicature (Sperber and Wilson 1986:182). According to relevance theory an act of communication can only be successful if it achieves relevance in a given set of contextual assumptions, and relevance is defined in terms of contextual effects and processing effort. There are three ways in which the contextualisation of new assumptions in a context of old assumptions may achieve some contextual effect: by adding new assumptions to the context in the form of contextual implications, by strengthening some old assumptions or by erasing others. Otherwise, if a contextualisation does not modify the context